Before there was Google, there was my dad. If I didn’t know something, I asked him. One day, when I watched him install a telephone line with a sling shot across an attic, I asked, “Dad, how do you know how to do all this stuff?” In his typical, Southern self-deprecating way, he said, “Well… it’s not from years of being smart. It’s from years of being stupid.” But bottom line: My dad knows a lot. He has stored up not only information but skills that have proven helpful both to me and my family. What you know (that is, what you have stored up in your brain) really matters.
During World War II, pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer ran an illegal seminary in Finkenwalde, Germany. One of the foci of this curriculum was deep practice of spirituality: Scripture, prayer, and theological confession. This was very different from the prevailing German model, which focused purely on academics. Bonhoeffer’s model included a strict regimen of memorizing Scripture.
It was not as though Bibles were sparse. They were everywhere, and in German. But, with the establishment of Hitler’s Reich Church, a state-sanctioned and state-controlled church, evangelical churches and seminaries that failed to comply with the Nazi regime were closed; the Gestapo arrested its adherents.
Bonhoeffer knew that persecution of genuine “confessing” Christians was inevitable. Arrest and death were likely outcomes. The seminary lasted only two years. Twenty-seven of its students were arrested. Bonhoeffer himself was executed. Having seen this likelihood, Bonhoeffer wanted his students to have stored up as much of the Bible as they could. They would most likely be in a prison cell somewhere, and the only Bible they could possess would be the one in their heads. Yet this was a Bible the Gestapo could never confiscate or bar access from.
As an artist, and a pastor, I have so many concerns about AI, but more so about the disappearance of knowledge. People these days generally do not know things, even the most basic, fundamental ideas upon which we live. Logic. History. Culture. Literature. Name it. As Jay Strack once predicted, technology is ushering humanity into another Dark Age, where people know nothing and will have preserved no knowledge for posterity. (I would recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz, but I don’t want to be responsible for your future insomnia.)
What if, in the outsourcing of our minds to bots, we find ourselves one day locked out of the artificial Omniscience? What if you have to rely for the rest of your life on the knowledge you currently have, or that of the people around you? How long would you last? Or what if AI rewrites history? Would you know the difference? Human beings have been rewriting history for a while, and we scarcely know the difference because we seldom bother to think of whether a thing offered to us, via web (save for a man surfing a dachshund), is actually true.
I don’t think this concern is unique to people who share my faith; from what I gather, it is a widespread human fear. Every day, more control is given to machines, and we know less. And I feel that one day we will be locked out; or rather, locked in, with only the knowledge we have gathered, pondered, and treasured.
I’m not a big believer in “big’ movements. They never change anything in the long run. Wendell Berry wrote very wisely on this subject; I hope to write about that soon. But for now, I think that, instead of stocking up on gold or gasoline, we should stock up on knowledge. We should read actual books that have stood the test of time. Buy books, read them, underline them, pass them on to your children, read them aloud to your grandkids. Write letters that preserve your thoughts and affections toward other people, human exchanges about ordinary, yet weighty, things. (Yes, paper can burn, I know. Bugs can eat it. But it would be a heck of a trick for someone to change the information on a paper page while your back, or attention, is turned.)
Here’s why this matters. Along with the disappearance of knowledge, comes the disappearance of humanity bearing God’s image. And, as Habakkuk writes, “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14).
Friend, store up knowledge. Not for the purpose of puffing you up, but of keeping you anchored to reality as the tsunami of digital ignorance approaches.
